In its constant pursuit of providing customers with the most secure, stable, and highest-performing hospitality software solutions, ReServe Interactive® recently upgraded its ReServe Cloud® software to the latest AWS database platform. ReServe Cloud is an enterprise solution, with a database for storage and various other server and network systems that provide a secure and responsive experience for its users. Amazon AWS is a rich platform of virtual computing resources. The AWS team is made up of some of the world’s leading experts on the cloud platform solutions they build and maintain. Relying on their expertise in these computing matters enables ReServe Interactive to focus on their own expertise of building catering, event management, reservations and table management software.

Around 1999, VMware introduced computer virtualization. A virtual computer acts like a physical computer from the perspective the software it hosts, but may run on a variety of physical computer hardware. For the last ten years Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have been key players in advancing cloud computing. Software companies, like ReServe Interactive, are no longer limited by their ability to employ hardware and database elites. This all translates to a more reliable service offering for their customers along with decreased costs to run mission-critical software.

AWS offers Aurora Postgres as a commercial database, which blows the socks off the database offerings of the early 2000s. Back then, the database was considered a critical point of failure. If the database solution went down due to hardware problems, security vulnerabilities, software bugs, or hundreds of other possible problems, the whole solution was dead in the water. AWS Aurora Postgres allows ReServe Cloud software to run multiple virtual database servers simultaneously, each with an independent copy of the data. One server, the Primary, is responsible for handling updates to data. Others are used for reading data. If the Primary database goes down, AWS automatically recognizes the problem and promotes one of the read databases to be the new Primary. No human intervention is required and AWS promises to handle this in 60 seconds or less. In other words, every piece of data entrusted to ReServe Cloud is protected with multiple layers of redundancy to ensure that business doesn’t miss a beat.

ReServe Cloud is deployed within multiple AWS facilities in different physical locations. The facilities are kept secure, secret and have power backup solutions if anything goes wrong with the power grid. This provides a stable environment with very little risk of failure. ReServe Cloud is also continuously backed up to additional AWS facilities on the other side of the country. If, for example, a natural disaster devastated AWS on one side of the country, ReServe Cloud will be made fully available in a short period of time.

The next time customers connect to ReServe Cloud, they’ll hopefully have a better appreciation of the state-of-the-art technology on which it runs, and ultimately services their business with 24/7 high-availability.

Dave Colwell is a Senior Software Architect with ReServe Interactive, a hospitality software solutions company that specializes in Catering, Event Management, Reservations and Table Management cloud applications. He survived computing’s Middle Ages and learned many lessons along the way. Dave is responsible for ReServe Cloud’s AWS infrastructure and for software development. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science at the dawn of the Internet age and has enjoyed building software systems ever since.